Can anyone explain how SSD disks are handled by the BeFS? I was just reading about a new solid state laptop, and some comments by users… These two were of interest to me:
"SSD has a finite life. Each sector can only be rewritten a certain number of times before it won’t take new data. There are algorithms that spread the writes over the entire drive, so instead of 10,000-100,000 writes to one sector, you get a trillion writes for the entire drive. That’ll take quite some time - 650KB/sec continuous for 10-100 years. That kind of abuse will kill most hard drives, and your computer would be obsolete by then.
One cool thing is that flash doesn’t fail all at once like a hard drive – so you’ll know when its life is up. Also, as you add capacity, you get even more rewrites."
"It should be noted that without those algorithms (i.e., using standard filesystems/storage methods) people have nuked some USB flash drives into plastic sticks, mainly by setting up Linux systems on them with a swap area (which rapidly goes bye-bye)."
Here’s the laptop: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/samsung-q30-solid-state-laptop-175714.php